Online content providers can provide electronic content to computing devices via the internet. The term “electronic content” refers to any type of media that can be displayed on mobile and other computing devices. Computing devices include devices such as desktop computers, laptop computers, smart phones, tablet computers, personal digital assistants, etc. Electronic content can include text or multimedia hosted on websites, such as standard web pages or mobile web pages specifically formatted for display on computing devices. Electronic content can also include application software developed for computing devices that is designed to perform one or more specific tasks at the computing device.
Online content providers, such as video management services, can provide access to electronic content. Online content providers can require subscribers to create and encode electronic content, such as audiovisual content, and upload the electronic content to the online content provider. Such online content providers do not provide the capability of creating and encoding electronic content from scratch. Creating and encoding electronic content may involve using the computing resources of the client device, such as processing cycles of a graphics processing unit (“GPU”) or a central processing unit (“CPU”).
Using computing resources of the client device can present challenges, particularly with respect to mobile devices, such as smart phones or personal digital assistants. Mobile devices may have fewer processing and memory resources available to create and encode electronic content as compared to a desktop computer creating and encoding the same electronic content. Using computing resources of a client device, such as a mobile device, to create and encode electronic content can degrade the responsiveness or other performance of the client device.